It refers to the greatest affliction of my life,--the only time when I
felt _despair_,--written a year after or more. Forgive all these
reticences. My husband calls me "peculiar" in some things,--peculiarly
l?che, perhaps. I can't articulate some names, or speak of certain
afflictions;--no, not to _him_,--not after all these years! It's
a sort of _dumbness_ of the soul. Blessed are those who can
speak, I say. But don't you see from this how I must want
"spiritualism" above most persons?
Now let me be ashamed of this egotism, together with the rest of the
weakness obtruded on you here, when I should rather have congratulated
you, my dear friend, on the great crisis you are passing through in
America. If the North is found noble enough to stand fast on the moral
question, whatever the loss or diminution of territory, God and just
men will see you greater and more glorious as a nation.
I had much anxiety for you after the Seward and Adams speeches, but
the danger seems averted by that fine madness of the South which seems
judicial. The tariff movement we should regret deeply (and do, some of
us), only I am told it was wanted in order to persuade those who were
less accessible to moral argument. It's eking out the holy water with
ditch water. If the Devil flees before it, even so, let us be content.
How you must feel, _you_ who have done so much to set this
accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of
hideousness! They should raise a statue to you in America and
elsewhere.
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